Books 

A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship With Nature (2009) (New)

For more than two centuries, Western cultures, as they became more industrialized, increasingly regarded the natural world as little more than a collection of useful raw materials. The folklore of powerful forest spirits and mountain demons was displaced by the practicalities of logging and strip mining. In the famous lament of Max Weber, our surroundings became “disenchanted,” and nature’s magic was swept away by secularization and rationalization. But over the last 35 years, Gibson argues, a new culture of enchantment has developed. As we grapple with increasingly dire environmental disasters, he points to this cultural shift as the last utopian dream, the final hope of protecting the world that all of us must live in.

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Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America (1994)

Vietnam signaled the end of America’s long history of martial victories. In Warrior Dreams , Gibson argues that the shame of defeat by a technologically inferior enemy, compounded by challenges to the status quo from feminism and minority groups, created a profound crisis in American identity—particularly for the white male—and gave birth to a disturbing and reactionary war culture designed to make the country well again. At the of this new mythology was the paramilitary warrior, a figure like Rambo or Dirty Harry, who fought outside military and law enforcement units controlled by corrupt liberal elites, in order to defeat America’s enemies.

Technowar, as Gibson defines it, was the war the United States fought and lost in Vietnam—a concept in which warfare was viewed as a production system: the officer corps were the managers; the enlisted men, the workers, the product—enemy deaths. On the military assembly line careers rose or fell according to the size of the body count, whether the dead were women and children or soldiers. The rule was: “If it’s dead and it’s Vietnamese, it’s V.C.” Gibson shows that the enemy , as Washington conceived it, but a technologically advanced enemy, the mirror image of ourselves. The leaders of the American military-industrial complex existed in a closed, self-referential universe. They believed their own fictions till the end.

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